Julian Warner

Julian Warner is a German-British artist and curator. He was artistic director of the Brecht Festival Augsburg from 2023 to 2025 and was responsible for the Festival of the Stuttgart Cultural Region in 2022. Prior to that, he designed festivals and spectacles for the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, the Münchner Kammerspiele and many others. He has working relationships with conceptual artist Anta Helena Recke, choreographer Joana Tischkau, theatre maker Oliver Zahn and musician Markus Acher. He is the editor of an anthology on problems of postcolonial criticism in Germany, "After Europe. Beiträge zur dekolonialen Kritik" (Verbrecher Verlag, 2021) and has been training as a group analyst at the Seminar für Gruppenanalyse Zürich (SGAZ) since 2019. Since 2025, he has held the professorship for transdisciplinary artistic practice at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts (HMDK).

Austrian premiere

A Black artist realises that he has become a soldier. He enters the stage as a cultural worker. But in the struggle for representation and resources, he is given a weapon and learns that the arts are no exception: the liberation of the occupied is also the occupiers’ terror. But is cultural warfare really war? Few have written as lucidly about violence in a fractured world as Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961). A psychiatrist and Marxist from Martinique, he was convinced that the dehumanisation brought on by European colonialism could not be overcome through negotiation and compromise, rather only by destroying it. Fanon’s justification of anti-colonial violence has been well received by leftists from the Black Panther Party to the Red Army Faction and is still the subject of controversial debate today. In which situations does one need to organise violence or resistance against it? On stage, the Black artist relives his transformation into a soldier. In the interplay of spoken word and the physical force of the drums, he interrogates the historical situation and explores his relationship to violence. 

Concept, performance, music: Julian Warner | Music & live drums: Markus Acher | Voice: Veronica Burnuthian | Dramaturgy: Veronika Maurer | Light, technics: Dennis Dita Kopp | Head of artistic production: Sabine Klötzer | Translations: Veronica Burnuthian, Anna McCarthy | Production: Studio Julian Warner Eine Koproduktion von donaufestival und Belluard Bollwerk, Kaserne Basel, , Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature, Theater Rampe, Münchner Kammerspiele, studiobühneköln

Content note: The performance addresses experiences of racism and recites racist comments.